How to request DWP Internal Process Review figures without getting refused

An Internal Process Review is what the department opens when a claimant dies or comes to serious harm and there is a suggestion that its own actions were involved.

A few things worth knowing before you send a request.

They are heavily redacted on release, which is reasonable in itself, because these involve people who have died and families who did not ask to be part of anyone's research. What is less reasonable is that the count has historically been hard to pin down, with different answers emerging through different routes at different times.

If you are requesting, ask for the number opened, the number closed, and the number where a recommendation was made and implemented, broken down by year. Asking for the documents themselves will get you a refusal under the personal data exemptions. Asking for the counts is considerably harder to refuse.

The BBC work that identified 82 cases where claimants died after alleged DWP activity came out of exactly this kind of digging. That number does not appear in any published statistic.